


We Should Get Jerseys (AU of an AU)

by 27dragons



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, M/M, Multi, Past Child Abuse, tags will be updated as required
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 20:44:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2164545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/27dragons/pseuds/27dragons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky is studying hard and working hard, because burying himself in work is easier than thinking about the hard truths that he's only recently begun to realize. Still, he's keeping it together -- keeping his grades up and saving up for an apartment of his own and even spending time with his friends -- until he takes a job in the art department and finds himself confronted with a past that he's not ready to face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [We Should Get Jerseys](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/68523) by Offtide. 



> This was inspired by (and is closely aligned with) offtide's [We Should Get Jerseys](http://getjerseys.tumblr.com/) webcomic, and I am _incredibly_ grateful to offtide for patiently answering my millions of questions and sanctioning this AU of the WSGJ AU. 
> 
> For several reasons, my story varies in a lot of ways from offtide's plot and details, so if you're following WSGJ -- which you absolutely should be! -- you should NOT expect them to match up! But my mental pictures for the characters absolutely matches offtide's gorgeous art.

Bucky was sitting on Natasha’s bed when she came back into the room after her shower. He had a textbook open across his lap, a highlighter in his hand, and a pen in his teeth. He didn’t look up at her entrance.

"You’ve got to stop breaking into my room," she said. She dropped the shower caddy in its corner and turned to the dresser to rummage for clothes. "Don’t you have your own room?"

"Yours is closer to all my classes," Bucky mumbled around the pen.

"You could wait in the student lounge. Everyone on the hall knows you by now, they’re not going to run you off."

Bucky grimaced. “They stare at my arm.” He rubbed at the metal prosthetic before highlighting another sentence and then pulling the pen out of his mouth to jot a note in the margin.

Natasha turned her back to pull on her panties, but she wasn’t even sure why she bothered, anymore. “You need to get over it,” she suggested. She hung her towel on the hook on the back of her door, and tugged a sports bra over her damp skin.

"Easy for you to say."

"I am _literally_ standing here in my underwear,” she pointed out, “telling you to get over the whole self-conscious thing. Your arm is _awesome_ , why would you not want to show it off?”

Bucky actually looked up long enough to glare at her, then looked back down at his book. He didn’t highlight anything else, though, and after a moment he dropped both highlighter and pen and shoved it off his lap with a sigh.

Natasha didn’t say anything. She took the box of markers out of her desk drawer and tossed it at Bucky. He caught it in his right hand and raised his eyebrow at her. She grinned and sat down with her back to him.

He sighed, beleaguered and long-suffering, which she ignored. He brushed his fingertips across the mostly-faded remnants of the “tattoo” across her shoulders and neck. “Touch-up or something new?”

"How long do you have?"

"Class is in an hour."

"Just a touch-up, then."

Bucky grunted and opened the box. When she felt the damp slide of the felt tracing across her skin, she said, “Clint and I are going to go get pizza tonight. You in?”

Bucky drew two more lines carefully across her shoulder, then tugged down the strap of her bra to continue them. “Got a shift at the diner tonight.”

"Again? You’re working too hard, Bucky-bear."

"Stop calling me that. And I hafta work. Ain’t no way I’m crawlin’ back to fuckin’ Pierce at the end of term."

"Your accent gets thicker when you’re pissed off, you know that?"

"You’ve mentioned it before."

"And now you’re being extra careful about it."

"I am going to write _Natasha is an asshole_ across the back of your neck instead of filling in these goddamn spiderwebs for you, I swear to fuckin’ god.” He yanked her bra strap back up a little harder than strictly necessary, but the touch of the marker on her skin was as smooth and light as ever.

Natasha grinned. “If we bring you some pizza for your dinner break, am I forgiven?”

"Pepperoni _and_ sausage,” Bucky bargained.

"That stuff is going to kill you."

"Not before you do."

"Probably true." She tugged down the other bra strap for him and pretended to consider it. "Oh, fine. You want two slices or three?"

"Three."

"God, you’re such a pig."

Bucky grabbed her arm in his metal hand so she wouldn’t be able to pull away and wrote _BITCH_ across the curve of her shoulder.

Natasha twisted her head to look at it. “Too bad for you, I like it.”

"Three slices," Bucky repeated with a smile she could hear in his voice.

***

"Jesus, don’t let _them_ in, they’ll suck all the class right out of the joint,” Bucky complained loudly when Natasha and Clint came in the front door of the SHIELD diner.

"Boss already went home?" Clint guessed. He fist-bumped Phil, who was manning the front counter, and headed for his favorite booth in the back corner

"Nah, I just convinced him that we should finally start being pickier about the clientele," Bucky snarked. He checked the room — aside from the couple on a date who’d acted downright huffy the last three times he’d asked if they wanted anything else, the place was empty.

He ducked into the kitchen. “Gonna take my dinner,” he said, and ducked out before the cook could tell him no. He filled three cups at the drink station and set them on the table, then slid into the booth next to Natasha. “Pizza,” he demanded. “Gimme.”

Natasha slid the takeout box over to him and retrieved a soda. “I figured it out,” she said.

"What," Clint asked, "you mean how Nick manages to keep this place in business?"

"It’s more of a lunch place than a dinner place," Bucky said, which was true. He wished his class schedule didn’t interfere so much with working the lunch shift. Next semester, he’d plan it better.

"Also, it’s a front for his criminal dealings," Natasha agreed serenely. She always said that, which didn’t make it not true, but Bucky figured if it _was_ true, he didn’t want to know. “And don’t talk with your mouth full, it’s disgusting. No, I figured out how you can get over your thing about the arm.”

Bucky glared at her over his pizza.

Clint took advantage of Bucky’s distraction to steal a pepperoni. “You have a thing about the arm?”

"He doesn’t like anyone looking at it," Natasha said, and slapped Clint’s hand away from Bucky’s pizza before he could steal a piece of sausage.

"Dude, I poked at it for like half an hour when we first met. Your arm is _metal as shit_.” Clint grinned stupidly, even though neither Bucky nor Natasha had ever laughed at the joke.

"Yes, exactly," Bucky said. "You _poked_ at it. I _know_ it’s weird as fuck, I’m not trying to _hide_ it. Which is why it weirds me the hell out when people try to pretend it’s totally normal but then just kind of… watch it out of the corner of their eye, like it’s going to crawl off my shoulder and go wandering around on its own or something.”

"I think I saw a horror movie like that once," Clint mused.

"Whatever," Natasha said impatiently. "I got it figured out. I ran into Sharon earlier — do you know Sharon? She’s one of the RAs over at Triskelion dorm — she told me that the Art Department is looking for people to model for their Life Drawing classes."

Clint started laughing, the asshole. Bucky kicked at him under the table, but Clint had been friends with Natasha for, like, their whole lives, so he was pretty good at dodging. “You are not serious.”

"Why not?"

Bucky groaned. “Are you kidding me? Do I look like any kind of model to you?”

"This is Life Drawing, not Marketing," she said. "They don’t want just anorexic waifs and beefcake football stars. They need all kinds of different people. You look all kinds of different! And it would be good practice for you to get used to people looking at you!"

Bucky growled into his drink. He wasn’t really body shy — spending his formative years in a group home had eroded his sense of modesty nearly entirely out of existence — but his _arm_ …

Natasha leaned in to rest her chin on his shoulder. “It’s a paying gig,” she said softly.

Bucky hated her, just a little bit, for knowing that would push him over the line. And he loved her a little more for leaving it until he was already teetering on the edge of indecision. He sighed, nearly as huffy as the couple who were probably going to stiff him on the tip when they left. “Fine,” he mumbled, “Send me the info or whatever.”

Clint started laughing again, until he yelped, “Ow!” and pouted. Natasha smiled and leaned back in the booth with her soda.

***

Steve was late, he was _really_ late, _God_ , that misogynistic asshole had made Steve late to his _favorite class_ and now Steve wanted to go find the jerk again and punch that smug sneer instead of just stepping in and pointedly offering to walk the harassed girl to her class.

Which _of course_ had been almost all the way on the other side of campus. Steve had run most of the way back, but then _of course_ he’d felt that damn tight spot in his chest that meant an asthma attack was threatening, so he’d had to slow it down to a walk and _still_ wound up having to stop for a couple of minutes to take a puff from the inhaler.

So here he was walking into Life Drawing almost fifteen minutes late. Steve was going to find that bully later and knee him in the nuts.

Steve kept his head down as he bustled in, mumbled a few words of apology to the teacher, and set up at the last remaining easel as quickly as he could. He wound up next to Jane, who he at least knew a little bit because her boyfriend was on the baseball team with Steve. She leaned in to whisper the assignment to him while he found a blank page in his pad and dug out his charcoal pencil.

Only then did he look up at the model. The man was half-reclining on a bench, facing away from Steve. There was a drape across his hip, but it fell so low that it didn’t leave much to the imagination. Steve ripped his eyes away from the dimples at the top of the model’s buttocks, but the clean, strong lines of his back weren’t really much better for Steve’s heartrate. Steve felt his cheeks begin to burn.

Jane nudged him. “I know,” she mouthed, grinning. “ _Right?_ " She winked.

Steve blushed harder. “You have a boyfriend,” he whispered back. “I’m going to tell him at practice—”

Jane’s eyes rounded in mock-terror, but she knew Steve would do no such thing, and even if he did, Thor was the least jealous, most trusting guy Steve had ever met, and would probably find the whole thing quite amusing. At least the banter served to calm Steve’s lingering anger at the jerk who’d made him late, and even if he was still blushing, he was able to look back at the model with a more impersonal eye.

Steve set the tip of his pencil to the paper and sketched out the long curve of the model’s spine, the tilt of his head, the fall of his hair, the bow of his shoulders,the sharp angle of his arm—

Was his left arm _metal_? And why hadn’t Steve noticed it before? He nudged Jane, indicated his own arm. Jane shrugged and whispered, “Prosthetic,” and went back to her own sketch.

It wasn’t like any prosthetic Steve had ever seen, but what the hell. He didn’t have time to worry about it, not now. He took a deep breath and went back to his sketch, keeping the lines loose and a little sloppy, trying to make up for lost time.

It seemed entirely too soon when the teacher called for the pencils to be put away. Steve bit his lip and eyed the sketch. Well, the point of taking a class was to improve, right? He could only go up from here. He sighed and wrote his name in the corner.

The model pulled on the bathrobe the teacher handed him and sat up. Steve was suddenly distracted and torn — he badly wanted to see the man’s face, but was afraid he might reveal his embarrassing reaction. He settled for watching out of the corner of his eye as he put his pencil away with exaggerated care.

Then the model turned, and Steve lost all hope of pretense. His head yanked up as if pulled by a marionette's string, his eyes rounding and his jaw dropping.

The model stumbled to a halt, too, similarly confounded.

Steve found his voice first. “Bucky?”

Bucky swallowed hard, and didn’t have to say a word for Steve to know he was right.

Steve smiled. “Holy shit, Bucky, who’d have thought, huh?” He reached out a hand, wanting to touch, to verify that this was _real_ …

Bucky’s eyes widened, and before Steve could even identify the expression as pure panic, he fled.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve dragged himself into Art History and fell into his usual seat with rather less than his usual care. Bucky — it _had_ been Bucky, he was _positive_ — had disappeared utterly by the time Steve had managed to pull himself together to follow Bucky’s flight from the room.

But why? Questions that Steve hadn’t dwelt on for years were suddenly swirling through his head, like _What changed?_ and _Did I do something wrong?_ and _Why won’t he just tell me?_ and _Is there something that I can do to fix it?_ And then, weirdly belatedly, _What happened to his arm?_

A warm hand touched his shoulder. Steve jumped and looked up to see Pepper standing beside his desk, her brows knit together with concern. “Steve, are you okay?”

"I, uh." He swallowed hard.

"Never mind. Come on, we’re ditching class today."

"What? Oh, no, no! I’m— I’ll be fine." Art History was one of Steve’s hardest classes. He couldn’t afford to skip.

"You’re obviously _not_ fine and you’re not going to hear a word of the lecture anyway. Natasha will let us copy her notes later, I’m sure. Right now, I need a coffee-flavored drink with _way_ too much sugar in it.”

Steve hesitated. He and Pepper weren’t close — more acquaintances than friends, really — but maybe he needed that, right now, more than a good friend like Sam who would see through him too easily. And while Pepper could be intimidatingly smart and confident, she was also unfailingly warm and kind. Steve slumped, accepting his fate. “Yeah, sure.” He grabbed his bag and followed Pepper meekly from the room.

Once they were outside, she pulled out her cell and thumbed a button. “You’re having coffee with Bruce today,” she said almost immediately. She flashed Steve an apologetic smile and kept walking as she talked. “Because I’m having coffee with Steve. Yes, my friend from Art History. No. I’m surprised you— Yes, of course. Don’t be so dumb, it’s— No, you can’t. Because I know for a fact you haven’t even started your grading yet, and— Well, if you’d done it when— How should I know? Ask Bruce. Of course we’re still on for dinner. I don’t know, Thai maybe? Okay, I’ll see you then. Love you too.”

She thumbed the phone and tucked it back into her bag. “Sorry about that. I usually have coffee with Tony after Art History.” Tony, Steve recalled, was Pepper’s boyfriend, a grad student and TA over in Engineering.

Steve stumbled to a stop. “Hey, I don’t want to mess up your date.”

"It’s not a date, it’s just coffee," Pepper said firmly, taking Steve’s arm and pulling him along when he would have slowed. "Date night is Saturday, and is _sacrosanct_ ,” she explained. “Coffee, on the other hand, gets rearranged all the time. Usually by Tony, so he owes me a few. Besides, he has a whole _stack_ of grading he’s supposed to be doing this afternoon, so you’re really doing us a favor.”

Pepper, Steve discovered, almost always got her way, and he soon found himself opening the door to the coffee shop on the edge of campus. Pepper smiled at him as he held the door for her, and suggested that he find a table for them while she got her coffee. He staked out a table by the window, and a few minutes later Pepper joined him with two mugs of something that looked more like a dessert than a drink. She waved off his protest carelessly. “You’ll owe me a favor sometime. Now tell me why you came into class looking like you’d seen a ghost.”

Steve took a sip of the coffee, trying to order his thoughts. It tasted more like dessert than a drink, too. He decided that if it were coffee, he hated it, but if he thought about it as a dessert, it wasn’t too bad. And he was already having a bad enough day. Dessert it was.

"There was a… I grew up in a group home," he said. Pepper nodded; he had told her that once before, the previous semester, when she’d asked if he was spending the holidays with family. He remembered liking that she’d been embarrassed for her faux pas but hadn’t acted at all as if she pitied him. It made it easier for him to tell her about it now.

"There was another boy there, Bucky, and we were… best friends, I guess. More than that, really. Maybe like brothers. I don’t know, just. It was always the two of us, him and me against the world. We stood up for each other. He… he got me through some pretty tough times. We were about thirteen when he was… placed. Adopted. It was…" Steve paused, looking down into his drink-dessert-thing, at the way the whipped cream was swirled into a perfect spiral on the top, but then turned messy and complicated where it was slowly dissolving into the liquid.

"It must have been hard on you," Pepper finally prompted.

"I was happy for him," Steve said. "It’s pretty much all you really want, in a place like that. To have a family you can call your own. But… well, yeah, it was a little lonely for me after he was gone." And painful, too, Steve didn’t say, because there had been safety in numbers, even when the number was only two, and Steve had never been the kind of guy to back down from a fight, whether or not he had backup.

"We wrote letters, for a while. ‘Bout a year, I guess, maybe a little longer. They trailed off, and then stopped. The counselor said what you’d expect, that he’d… moved on, y’know? Made new friends, whatever. That it was just something that people _did_. Moved on.” Steve drew in a breath, nearly as lost now as he’d ever been. “I just couldn’t quite believe…” He sighed. “I did, eventually, stop expecting that another letter would come. Don’t know that I ever stopped _hoping_ , though.”

He bit his lip, wondering if he’d said too much. To cover it, he took a sip from the drink-thing, and glanced up to see if Pepper was following him at all. She was sitting with her hands curled around her mug, the foamy whipped cream on the top all but undisturbed, and her eyes — he knew they were green, because she’d told him that, but green wasn’t a color he could see, so the word that came to mind when he looked at her eyes was _warm_. Warm and patient, and fixed unwaveringly on his face.

"That’s sad," she said gently, "but it sounds like old news. What happened today?"

Steve looked back down into his drink and hoped like hell that Tony appreciated her for the wonder she was. “I saw him. He’s here, on campus.”

"Wow," Pepper breathed. "Yeah, that must have been a shock."

Steve forced out something vaguely resembling a laugh. “He was the _model_ in my Life Drawing class,” he said. “I didn’t recognize him until class was done, but… as soon as he saw me, he just…” Steve covered his eyes with his hand. “Didn’t even say hi. Just ran away.” He took a big gulp of the dessert-thing to cover the sudden scratchiness in his throat. “I don’t understand, Pepper. We were _best friends_ for six, seven years, and… if all that had happened was that we’d grown apart, you’d think he’d be able to manage a civil hello, right?”

"That does sound… odd," Pepper admitted. "And you have no idea why?"

"None," Steve groaned miserably. "If it was something I did, I want to fix it, but I don’t know what it could have been."

"Steve," Pepper said, reaching across the table to grip his arm, "I’m sure it wasn’t you. Maybe he was afraid. Maybe he thought you’d be angry with him, after all this time."

The touch was grounding and comforting, but Steve knew Pepper was barking up the wrong tree. Bucky had never been afraid of a damn thing in his life… And he’d known that Steve could never be angry with him, not for long. Pepper didn’t know what it had been like, back then.

God, Bucky had been the center of Steve’s whole world.

And he’d been so sure that he was the center of Bucky’s, too.

No, no, he was _not_ going to break down in tears here in the middle of the damn coffee shop. He was _not_. He dragged in a breath and stood up. “I. I need to go get changed for practice,” he said, not quite meeting Pepper’s startled gaze. “Thanks for the coffee. And for listening.”

She patted his arm. “You’re welcome,” she said. “Text me later, okay? I’ll copy Natasha’s notes from class and email them to you.”

Steve nodded and left as quickly as he could, walking in long, ground-eating strides, head down. _Bucky_ , he thought, _why?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Offtide's summary/progression for Steve and Bucky's childhood is [here](http://getjerseys.tumblr.com/post/94213221197/offtide-some-of-yall-wanted-to-see-the). You can consider it canon for this fic.

**Author's Note:**

> This updates _very slowly_ , I'm afraid, and chapters will almost always be posted to [my tumblr](http://everyworldneedslove.tumblr.com/) in the before they're added here.


End file.
